Probably wasn't the best idea to post the first chapter a week before two weeks of final exams, but I mean, what did you expect, good decisions? :D The characters had to get it from somewhere :')

Anyways. She lonely.

It's like the middle of December right now in the story, if anyone was wondering. Last chapter was late November, early December.

It's not unfamiliar, to wake up to the sound of a keyboard click-clacking away; in fact, it is—or at least was—probably Rinko's most listened to lullaby as well. He tends to use his laptop with flatter (and quieter) keys when working at hours at which reasonable (read: human) people should be asleep, rather than the mechanical keyboard of his desktop—but not tonight, apparently.

How is it, she wonders to herself in exasperation, that she can always hear him going click-click-clack-click-clack on mechanical keyboards through the damn wall? It's faint, but easily recognizable, and entirely too difficult to ignore once noticed.

"Your typing sounds like a machine gun," she told him once, a long time ago, to which he laughed, his Christmas gift, a new and hopefully quieter keyboard, sitting in his lap. She'd freely admit, it was probably more for her and all their coworkers than for him.

The sounds only get louder when she steps into the hallway; turns out, his door is cracked open slightly, and she nudges it open more to peek inside out of sleepy curiosity.

His fingers don't pause, but he glances back slightly at her for a moment before going back to work, squinting at the bright boxes (yes, plural; honestly, four monitors is pretty tame compared to his setup in his mansion) in the darkness of the room. The meager light throws his pallid skin and too prominent cheekbones and sunken eyes into stark relief against the shadows engulfing the rest of him.

Rinko huffs loudly.

"Honestly," she mutters, flicking on the light switch. She takes a moment to enjoy a petty flash of amusement at his distinctly vampire-esque flinch. "I keep telling you you'll go blind if you keep this up."

Akihiko looks rather unimpressed by her telling him off—not that he hasn't heard it a million times already—and just keeps typing away. Loudly.

Rinko sighs. She should've known better than to expect him to care about his real body (not that he did much before either), especially now that he has so little use for it.

For a few minutes, she leans against the doorframe, trying to figure out what to do now. She can already feel herself becoming trapped in that state of being too tired to function without coffee (an unfortunate habit she picked up from him) and too awake to go back to sleep easily (the light admittedly doesn't help).

It is two in the morning. Might as well get something done. With her, it usually depends on the day, but today, sleep is for the weak.

After a cup of coffee and some premade curry that he'd made to stick in the freezer, she returns to her bed and cracks open her laptop, resigning herself to an early morning of grading tests, one of the less fun parts about teaching.

Now it's too quiet, she realizes suddenly, and stares at the wall next to her, through which she can hear faint keyboard sounds still. It's a little silly, but she's just now realizing how big a part he was of her daily life. Even for two people who were dating each other, they did spend a lot of time together. As much as she liked to make fun of his absurdly loud typing, it did make for nice, repetitive background noise after some time, and she got used to having it there as she went through busy work.

It's been a few weeks now, and Rinko is starting to become more and more desensitized to living with an internationally wanted criminal and mass-murderer, enough to just wander into his room and crawl into his bed with her laptop. It's just like old times, ignoring the IV drip and the NerveGear sitting next to the pillow.

It's a little scary, how soon she's finding herself getting used to this situation—and what that says about her, she doesn't care to think too much about, even though it's all she can think about when she should be sleeping at night. But still, she doesn't care to go near all the emotions she's been keeping bottled up for weeks with a three meter long pole.

She thought she was confident in what she felt for so long. And the part that she was confident in, she still is. That's why she's still here, after all. It's everything else that changed.

Do I hate him? Should I hate him?

It's still dark out when he shuts off the computer. With slow steps on bare feet, he approaches and looks at her patiently, expectantly, and for all the pieces that her heart breaks into each time he returns to the virtual world, she still finds herself getting up, letting him take her spot and replace the NerveGear on his head.

Why can't I hate him?

And then she's alone on the ground again, while he's ruling his floating steel castle in the sky.

o0o0o

Rinko finds that despite going to the lab at least four days a week, her world is slowly shrinking down to that little cottage in the mountains, her vision narrowing down to the endless winter outside the windows.

She drifts away from her friends—not for lack of trying on their part, instead out of selfishness on hers. Every time she looks them in the eye, all she can see are the lingering shadows cast by the floating castle still blotting out the sun. Shutting them out was the only way she could think of to appease her own guilt when it became too much to bear.

I just need time to myself, she claims as an excuse, even though she's already sick and tired of being so alone all the damn time, but she figures any chance at carrying on a normal life was ruined when she couldn't pick the knife back up.

The endless winter makes it easier, almost. Up there, in the middle of nowhere where no one can find them, there's plenty to keep her occupied. The roads have to be cleared somewhat almost every morning before she can leave, the car has to be covered when it snows or even hails, and sometimes the door gets frozen shut overnight.

Some days are harder than others. Work is more draining than it should be, or she just wakes up with less energy than she needs to get through the day.

Rinko is halfway home on one of those days when she realizes she never got food, and she curses quietly to herself behind the wheel. She ran out of the small store of frozen food that Akihiko made the night after she went grocery shopping, so she's been trying out some of his recipes, but she doesn't think she has the energy to do anything but flop into bed when she gets home.

By the time she arrives, she's resigned herself to an empty stomach for the night, so when she shuts the door behind her and lets her boots fall haphazardly by the door and sees a bowl of her favorite comfort food covered in plastic wrap on the table, her brain decides that this is too much, and now is a really good time to just sit down and cry for a solid ten minutes.

He has perfect timing, in many ways. It seems like he always enjoys reminding her that she's not alone at the moments she can't be sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

You've still got me, he seems to be saying.

Needless to say, it doesn't clear up the confusion, at all.

o0o0o

Truly impeccable timing, he has.

"You look tired," his soft voice remarks from the doorway, as if observing the weather. It's getting a little rusty and creaky from disuse.

Too tired to be surprised at his sudden emergence from Aincrad, Rinko blinks hard at her laptop screen in the yellowish glow of the kitchen light. "My parents just asked if I'd like to come home for the holidays."

"Ah." A pause. "Are you going to go? You had to turn them down last year, didn't you?"

Of course he wouldn't understand.

"As if I could face them," she whispers, refusing to look at him. "Did you need something?" They both hear the tremor in her voice as she forces the words past the lump in her throat.

"No. I just saw the light on and was curious." His tone is still conversational, relaxed. "I'm glad you're staying. Oyasumi."

Her hands clench into fists atop her keyboard as she listens to his footsteps retreating. He's not even trying, is the sad part. She's pretty sure he doesn't care about or even need her here enough to manipulate her; it's just something that he does, apparently.

After six years, she supposes that it must come naturally at this point.

I know absolutely nothing about the logistics of caring for the body of a mostly comatose patient, so we're just going to assume she's doing that successfully on top of everything else :')

Also, I feel like they bickered a lot, over dumb stuff (like his loud typing), but in like a joking way :P Especially because he's a workaholic and she's usually the responsible one like 'you dumbass take a break and go to sleep'. Like, that's literally how their relationship started, with her basically telling him that he would rot away without occasionally seeing the sun. And sometimes, she's totally just as bad as he is, but she's definitely the only person he would ever listen to about that kind of stuff.